Mothers and others
"Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution." "Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends - and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not"--Jacket.
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What Hacker News says
- There certainly were objections to Montessori and, as we see today, fierce arguments among the many thought leaders who dedicated their lives to transforming education. But I disagree that “progressive intellectuals” “adamantly and vociferously rejected Montessori for pedagogical reasons.” Education often becomes bogged down in idealogical warfare because we become distracted by differences instead of uniting on common ground. I think there is a lot of common ground, both historically and today. Building on that will advance both Montessori pedagogy and the transformation of education.
If you have not read “Founding Mothers and Others”, I highly recommend it. Many progressive schools were founded by women who studied with Montessori, sought to spread her pedagogy and gave her great respect and credit. Helen Salz and Flora Arnstein,founders of San Francisco’s Presidio Hill School, were inspired to launch their school after observing Montessori work with children in a glass walked classroom at the 1915 San Francisco Exposition. Other Californians attended her California lectures, studied her work, traveled to Italy or trained in her US programs. They went on to found schools and train teachers. This didn’t stop in 1916, indeed most of these schools were founded between 1918 and 194o. They still exist and acknowledge their Montessori roots.
Margaret Naumberg, who trained extensively with Montessori, simultaneously launched a public Montessori and a private one in New York. The schools had very different results but I don’t know why the public program was not replicated or sustained. I wonder what lessons we could learn from the difference in the public implementation and the private one which grew into The Children’s School, later the Walden School, which lasted for over 50 years.
Helen Parkhurst was purportedly the only person Maria Montessori authorized to train teachers. She is known as the “mother of the Dalton School” and the architect of the Dalton Plan which was extremely influential in inspiring school design not just in the US but internationally. Dalton remains a leading school in both popularity with families, credibility with college admissions offices, and with the education community. It would be interesting to learn how you think it is aligned with Montessorian pedagogy and how it differs.
The bigger question is what are the essential elements of a Montessori education and how are they adapted across different contexts? Should Montessori classrooms only have Montessori materials? For example, can they incorporate Caroline Pratt’s unit blocks? Can’t we teach educators to observe play with unit blocks & facilitate intellectual development through applying Montessori methods with these excellent non-Montessori materials?
Montessori principles are widely taught in education philosophy, early childhood, and child development courses. The basic principles are familiar but not the practices. Is that because the education establishment has shut them out or because the AMI & AMS have not made training accessible? That is probably a hot button question for a highly visible and rapidly growing start up but, IMO, the success of Higher Ground & the Bezos “Montessori inspired” schools will hinge on three things, accessibility, adaptability, and accountability. Indeed any form of transformation will have to tackle those three areas and that is one reason finding common ground is important.
Your work is interesting and important. Good luck!
- The book "Mothers and Others" discusses this at length, positing not only did mothers have much more "Alloparental" support in the past, but this was the key fact that allowed the evolution of our big brains. That is, alloparental involvement was a necessary precursor to homo sapian big-brain evolution and the key thing that was lacking in other apes.
Very interesting and highly reccomended
- I don't disagree, but I think the framing is overly pejorative and makes the likelihood of this outcome seem more tenuous than it really is. We do lots of things to help others because they make us feel nice. "Mothers and Others" by Sarah Hrdy argues that this tendency isn't just a fluke or a game-theoretic equilibrium of some kind between fundamentally self-interested agents, it's an ancient and deeply ingrained aspect of human nature.
The thought of living in a constructed world that exists by the grace of a single human owner of a super-powerful AGI is distasteful, of course, especially if the human owner uses their power to impose some of their own opinions about how people should think and behave. Becoming dependent on AGI is probably inevitable at some point, but I don't see that as so different from the status quo. We're already dependent on systems created by other humans that are so complex and sophisticated that no individual can grok them all.
I guess I would like to think that we will move past any initial impulse that the owner of the AGI feels to control other humans. We will presumably change so much that old ideas about how we should think and behave will seem irrelevant and quaint. And the AGI, which presumably will have the social engineering superpower, will hopefully point out inconsistencies between the owner's desire to control human thought and behavior and their desire for humans to live their best lives. Hopefully.
